Turn the tap off. Ask questions later. Stress test their data centre.
It's absurd that they think they can just pay for the water they stole and call it square.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Using tap water for cooling is such an idiotic engineering decision it feels like it was suggested by an LLM chatbot.
Power plants use water too, but they draw it from the nearby river or lake, recycle it through cooling towers, and/or dump it back out into the river or lake. Or course that has its own effects, but at least it's not depriving a nearby town of drinking water by existing.
The pipes were running just nearby the data centre, free real estate
unnoticed
They don't have any regulations and don't need to pay anything??
What a wild, barbaric country.
Kind of fascinating that they don't do any kind of reconciliation of water delivered against water billed. You'd think that would be an easy thing to do and a good way to discover leaks (or theft). I mean, there would definitely be 'missing' water due to leaks, fire department, etc, but one imagines that would have some kind of normal/tolerable range, and that 30 million missing gallons would trigger some kind of investigation prior to customer complaints.
It sounds like they hooked up their own water connection so the water utility didn't even know they were using the water. They can only measure usage by checking the meter attached to your hookup. I don't think its possible to measure the entire 'input' of water versus total usage like you're suggesting.
Water company can measure the water that leaves their pumping station(s) - just put a flow meter on the one big pipe. If that doesn't match the sum of all their customer meters, then water is going somewhere else - broken pipe, illegal connection, meter fraud, whatever.
I would guess that most jurisdictions already have that one big flow meter, because they have to comply with water rights agreements, have to know how much chlorine & fluoride to inject, etc.
If that doesn’t match the sum of all their customer meters, then water is going somewhere else
That's probably exactly what they did, but usually the water meter at customers is only measured or reported on once per year, so it takes months before the difference becomes clear in the data.
Maybe they do commercial customers different, but I'm about 30 miles north of the site in question, and my water use is reported in real time. I can even get a daily report from their web site. It's hard to believe they'd be less interested in the usage of their 1e6-gallon-per-year commercial customers than their 1e4-gallon-per-year residential customers.
They can only measure usage by checking the meter attached to your hookup.
Depends on the age of the system. Newer meters can be read remotely.
Same difference though. These people didn't have a meter at all because the water utility didn't connect them to the water grid. It'd be similar to someone running their own line to the nearest power pole.
a case of 'boss goto jail', hopefully!
Trump country.
When the county utility investigated, officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.
I believe the only reasonable reaction to this would be to shut down the data center immediately until this is settled. Sounds like massive fraud. Am I expecting that to happen? Hell no.
fraud? this is plain stealing. The ones who own the data center should go to prison.
At least shut off both water connections and fine the shit out of them for theft